RAID

RAID, which is an acronym of Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a software or hardware storage virtualization technology that enables a system to take advantage of many hard drives as a single logical unit. In other words, all drives are used as one and the data on all of them is the same. Such a setup has 2 major advantages over using a single drive to save data - the first is redundancy, so if one drive breaks down, the information will be accessible through the remaining ones, and the second is better performance because the input/output, or reading/writing operations will be spread among multiple drives. There are different RAID types based on the number of drives are employed, whether reading and writing are both handled from all drives at the same time, if data is written in blocks on one drive after another or is mirrored between drives in the same time, and so on. According to the exact setup, the error tolerance and the performance may vary.

RAID in Cloud Hosting

All content which you upload to your new cloud hosting account will be saved on quick SSD drives which function in RAID-Z. This setup is built to use the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud web hosting platform and it adds another level of protection for your site content in addition to the real-time checksum validation that ZFS uses to guarantee the integrity of the data. With RAID-Z, the data is saved on a couple of disks and at least 1 is a parity disk - whenever information is written on it, an extra bit is added, so in case any drive stops working for whatever reason, the integrity of the information can be verified by recalculating its bits based on what is stored on the production hard drives and on the parity one. With RAID-Z, the functioning of our system will never be interrupted and it will continue operating efficiently until the problematic drive is changed and the information is synchronized on it.

RAID in Semi-dedicated Hosting

The information uploaded to any semi-dedicated hosting account is saved on SSD drives which work in RAID-Z. One of the drives in type of a configuration is used for parity - each time data is cloned on it, an additional bit is added. In case a disk turns out to be faulty, it will be taken out of the RAID without disturbing the functioning of the sites since the data will load from the other drives, and when a new drive is included, the information that will be cloned on it will be a mix between the data on the parity disk and data stored on the other hard disks in the RAID. That is done so as to ensure that the data that is being cloned is correct, so the moment the new drive is rebuilt, it could be incorporated into the RAID as a production one. This is an additional warranty for the integrity of your data since the ZFS file system that runs on our cloud Internet hosting platform compares a unique checksum of all of the copies of your files on the separate drives so as to avoid any probability of silent data corruption.

RAID in VPS Hosting

The SSD drives which we use on the physical machines where we create virtual private servers function in RAID to make sure that any content you upload will be available and intact all of the time. At least a single drive is employed for parity - one bit of information is added to any data cloned on it. In case a main drive fails, it is replaced and the data that will be copied on it is calculated between the remaining drives and the parity one. It's done this way to ensure that the correct info is copied and that not a single file is corrupted because the new drive will be incorporated into the RAID afterwards. In addition, we use hard disk drives functioning in RAID on the backup servers, so if you add this upgrade to your VPS package, you shall use an even more reliable Internet hosting service because your content will be available on multiple drives regardless of any kind of unforeseen hardware malfunction.